Efficient and Highly Scalable Route Discovey for On-demand Routing Protocols in Ad hoc Networks

This paper presents a number of different route discovery strategies for on-demand routing protocols, which provide more control to each intermediate node make during the route discovery phase to make intelligent forwarding decisions. This is achieved through the idea of self-selection. In self-selecting route discovery each node independently makes route request (RREQ) forwarding decisions based upon a selection criterion or by satisfying certain conditions. The nodes which do not satisfy the selection criterion do not rebroadcast the routing packets. We implemented our self-selecting route discovery strategies over AODV using the GloMoSim network simulation package, and compared the performance with existing route discovery strategies used in AODV. Our simulation results show that a significant drop in the number of control packets can be achieved by giving each intermediate node more authority for self-selection during route discovery. Furthermore, a significant increase in throughput is achieved as the number nodes in the network is increased